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I are an elitist.

Some­one in com­ments a while back — I think it was Jolene — made an obser­va­tion about charges of “elit­ism” against Barry O. To para­phrase: Why do we encour­age our chil­dren to excel in school, work hard, achieve, get good grades, get into the best col­leges, think inde­pen­dently, read widely, etc., if at the end of all this they’ll stand before us and we’ll call them elitists?

Good ques­tion.

I thought of it again when I read, via Rome­nesko, a heart-clutching memo from Lee Abrams, a for­mer radio guy who’s now some­thing like “chief inno­va­tion offi­cer” for the painfully evolv­ing Tri­bune Co. He’s sup­posed to be the fresh-eyed out­sider charged with re-imagining news­pa­pers in the new era. A few of his thoughts:

ASSUMPTIONS: Pos­si­bly the biggest prob­lem. Assum­ing. I met a reporter who spent 4 years in Bagh­dad. Dodg­ing bullets…staying in Hotels pro­tected by the Marines. Yet, I’ll bet NO-one out­side of the build­ing knew this per­son was risk­ing their life in Iraq to get YOU the news. If it were CNN, you’d see rock­ets and RPG’s in the back­ground as the reporter ducks shrap­nel. In the paper, it’s usu­ally a small byline.

Hell, papers should have pho­tos of the reporter with Iraqi kids…be writ­ing diaries. Before I joined Tri­bune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe report­ing the news…Because the paper “assumed” I knew.

THE NPR FEEL? News­pa­pers strike me as being a lit­tle TOO NPR. I like NPR, and their shows like Morn­ing Edi­tion do well. But NPR can also be a bit elit­ist. Morn­ing News Radio has a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties to papers: Sim­i­lar tar­get audi­ence; Old Media; Time restraints. It’s prob­a­bly a good thing to study the feel of a well honed All News Radio sta­tion. Yeah, a dif­fer­ent medium, but I some­times get a slower more intel­lec­tual NPR feel from papers than a usu­ally quicker paced and more main­stream News Radio deliv­ery. It’s all about being INTELLIGENT…not intel­lec­tual. We are in the main­stream busi­ness. The 2008 Main­stream busi­ness. SMART…but not elite.…and we DO get a lit­tle NPR at times. (And I DO like NPR…)

I can’t go back to news­pa­pers. I just can’t.

At least he didn’t sug­gest we all write STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS with ran­dom caps; Like This; …like our READERS DO. They’ll under­stand, because more of them are like Lee ABRAMS, a man who made a for­tune in radio but DIDN’T KNOW that reporters actu­ally GO PLACES LIKE IRAQ to cover Iraq. The paper just Assumed he knew that when a Story has a Date­line that says BAGHDAD, that means IT WAS WRITTEN THERE.

OK, I’ll stop.

But this is, sim­ply, bull­shit. I love the part about craft­ing the paper more in the model of all-news radio than NPR. Of course, I am an elit­ist — THERE, Lee Abrams, I SAID IT — but I’ve been lis­ten­ing to NPR so long now that I sim­ply can­not abide any other sort of news radio. It’s imper­fect, granted, but on most days it’s an oasis, and if it were to dis­ap­pear tomor­row I’d just throw all my radios away. YES, Lee, I WOULD. Of course, I hap­pen to hate all-news radio with a pas­sion. Hate. The weather on the sev­ens, traf­fic on the nines, sports brought to you by your friends at Gut​ter​Hoods​.com, the con­stant yap­ping com­mer­cials, all of it. Some of us are try­ing to under­stand the world’s events, not cram a few phrases between ellipses and call it news.

Some­one told me the other day that the anchor of one of Detroit’s morn­ing drive all-news/talk sta­tions makes $1 mil­lion a year. I think it was Paul W. Smith. He writes a col­umn for the News. Here’s a selec­tion from one of his most recent:

I can only imag­ine (but I never hope to find out) the roller coaster of emo­tions that affected Metro Detroi­ters have been expe­ri­enc­ing since storms knocked out the elec­tric­ity last week. Some peo­ple were with­out power for up to a week, and I don’t blame them for being angry and won­der­ing why it took so long to fix it. Too many cuts? Where do power offi­cials put the extra thou­sand work­ers or so when every­thing is O.K. — when we take for granted that the lights will come on when we throw the switch? We sure shouldn’t be angry at those men and women who have been climb­ing those poles, clear­ing those limbs and hold­ing on for dear life as the next storm rum­bled through.

He goes on to note that mel­ons are a lux­ury item in Japan, con­denses a press release about a zoo fundraiser and con­cludes with this bit of Abrams-approved self-promotion, not a photo with Iraqi kids but good enough:

Thank you, Mar­ket­ing & Sales Exec­u­tives of Detroit for pre­sent­ing me with your 2008 Exec­u­tive Lead­er­ship Award this com­ing Wednes­day.

There’s a news­pa­per col­umn writ­ten — or phoned in — in the pre­cise style of all-news radio: A rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, an opin­ion no one would find objec­tion­able, an odd­ity from a funny for­eign land and fin­ish­ing with an air-kiss to the but­tocks. INTELLIGENT, not intel­lec­tual, as Abrams might say.

I’m assum­ing Abrams is not being paid in hugs and kisses. And yet he is unem­bar­rassed to write, Before I joined Tri­bune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe report­ing the news. Why is it OK to call a smart per­son with smart-person atti­tudes and taste an elit­ist, but not to call Abrams, well, ignorant?

Just won­derin’.

EDIT: You toss off some­thing in 15 min­utes between chores, and the next minute you’re on Rome­nesko. Our com­ments pol­icy: First-timers go to mod­er­a­tion before appear­ing. I will try to keep up, but I have to go out in a bit and there may be a delay.

Posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
in Media.

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50 responses to
“I are an elitist.”

  1. Kevin Knuth said on June 18th, 2008 at 3:07 pm

    Nancy,

    You may be an elit­ist, but we still love you.

    ;)

  2. Kevin Knuth said on June 18th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

    Iron­i­cally, that google ads that appeared when I posted my first com­ment were for NPR!!

    gotta love that!

  3. Jeff said on June 18th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    Your after­noon com­ment, brought to you by Garden-Weezle — When it comes to elit­ism, is that really so bad? More on that in the six o’ clock hour, but first: HAVE YOU SEEN THE RADAR? Barry, whad­daya got up there? [muf­fled metal­lic voices echo and boom over] I-71, to the interch [the rotor sound and occa­sional squ] end­ing around mid­night [eal­ing and click] THANKS for that update, and this evening, “Elit­ists: Do they live longer?” That goes with­out say­ing, even if they have to spend time on their land­scap­ing on their hands and knees — [music cue] Garden-Weezle is the name, in the sun­shine, or the rain, keeps you from that ol’ back pain, Garden-Weezle, Garden-WEEZLE! [fan­fare, exit cue] We’ve pretty much gone through the ques­tion of elit­ism and said all that can be said, but REALLY FOLKS, I MEAN, C’MON, you know what i’m say­ing? So, Jab­ber­lips, HOW ABOUT THOSE CELTICS, HUH?

  4. paddyo' said on June 18th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

    All-news radio? All-NEWS? Yikes. Where I live (Den­ver), that dis­ap­peared years ago. The so-called all-news sta­tion still calls itself that, but it’s merely a rip-‘n’-read run­down at the top of the hour and then noth­ing but con­ser­v­a­tive and/or lib­er­tar­ian yap-yap-yap the rest of the hour, plus those traffic-and-weather-on-the-8’s upd-8’s. Iron­i­cally, one of the NPR affil­i­ates here, using some largesse from unnamed deep-pockets con­trib­u­tors, has beefed up its own local news report­ing (which until a cou­ple of years ago was also rip-‘n’-read) with some orig­i­nal daily spot sto­ries on occa­sion. Ain’t much, but it’s a start.
    Then again, isn’t radio also now sup­posed to be a ter­ri­bly old-fogey-fuddy-duddy medium, and I’m just show­ing my gray­bearded age? Off you go, old man, to the grave­yard for irrel­e­vant media …

  5. alex said on June 18th, 2008 at 3:58 pm

    Why is it OK to call a smart per­son with smart-person atti­tudes and taste an elit­ist, but not to call Abrams, well, ignorant?

    It’s quite all right with me if you call him igno­rant. What’s so great about democ­racy is that igno­rant peo­ple get to talk, igno­rant peo­ple get to vote and best of all igno­rant peo­ple even get paid big bucks to play con­sul­tant to des­per­ate busi­nesses they know absolutely noth­ing about.

    It’s high time for a pen­du­lum swing, how­ever. The com­mon man’s shit has become just a lit­tle bit too com­mon. We need a return to gov­er­nance by the smart for a while.

  6. Dan said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    The Tri­bune Com­pany is dead. I grew up read­ing the Chicago Tri­bune (and Sun-Times, which has its own prob­lems, though self-humiliation like this isn’t one of them), so this is par­tic­u­larly sad for me.

    I’m try­ing to imag­ine what Mike Royko would have to say about this buffoon.

  7. Jason T. said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

    Tes­tify! If I had a lighter, I’d be hold­ing it up right now, Nance.

    I sel­dom check Rome­nesko any more, but I saw the same story and thought: Yes, the real prob­lem with news­pa­pers is that they haven’t been dumbed down enough.

    Egad.

  8. Donnieb78 said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    Fol­lowed the link from Poynter…Great stuff and thanks for express­ing your Abrams out­rage bet­ter than I could have.
    Great for our democ­racy that we have highly paid suits who didn’t know that reporters are risk­ing their lives in Iraq.
    I kept read­ing his memo for clues that it was a par­ody of a clue­less “New Media” exec, but appar­ently not.

  9. LAMary said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:27 pm

    KCFR Paddy-o? We used to call it can’t see that far. I toiled in the music library there in col­lege. There was no ATC or Morn­ing Edi­tion then.
    NPR does spoil you for any other news. Some of the reporters are just great. Some so so. Mee Shell Nor­ris gets on my nerves. John Bur­nett is terrific.

  10. Michael said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

    Now hold on one cot­ton pickin’ minute. Before you guys get me all pig bit­ing mad (been want­ing to use that phrase all week for some rea­son), let’s give all news radio it’s due.

    I, for instance, am a gen­uine all news radio lis­tener. Espe­cially dur­ing morn­ing drive time. This is infre­quent because I rarely drive in the am, but when I do, and I don’t want to think hard enough to lis­ten to NPR or BBC, I find the movie review-ettes, restau­rant plugs inex­tri­ca­bly con­nected to the adver­tis­ing depart­ment, and those mean­ing­ful 3 ques­tion inter­views with “real” news­mak­ers, to be suf­fi­cient back­ground noise to drown out my 12 year old engine.

    Besides those pest con­trol guys need to spend their
    adver­tis­ing dol­lars somewhere.

    ’nuff said.

  11. Jim Sunshine said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:36 pm

    Lee Abrams sounds like the sort of fool brought in by cor­po­rate to pre­side over and be blamed for the final death agony of news­pa­pers. The cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of Wall Street oper­a­tors now in con­trol hasn’t a clue about what they have done to news­pa­pers and where to go from here. There­fore, why not bring in Abrams the “inno­va­tor?” Every one of his rec­om­men­da­tions has been tried over the last four decades and every one has failed for the sim­ple rea­son that news­pa­pers are infor­ma­tion not enter­tain­ment. If the def­i­n­i­tion of insan­ity is really doing the same thing over and over and expect­ing a dif­fer­ent result, he is just the ticket.

  12. coozledad said on June 18th, 2008 at 4:56 pm

    Before the con­sol­i­da­tion of a lot of small family-run news­pa­pers, I always thought of my local paper as a sort of spread­sheet that indi­cated the rel­a­tive power of indi­vid­u­als in the money set, and if con­sulted reli­giously, an ora­cle that would reveal who had got­ten them­selves a face full of ass, and who had theirs kissed. I watched the own­ers of the paper cut jobs and hand the job of editor/ fea­tures writer off in turn to:
    1. A dim frat­boy, whose true call­ing may have been pick­ing apples, but not writ­ing about it.
    2.A humor­less, notably gawky young woman who’d just got­ten out of Bob Jones or a sim­i­lar place. She could be seen stag­ger­ing around town in white leo­tards and a knee length dress in all sea­sons, stop­ping occa­sion­ally to blow her nose in her hand or stare at a door for sev­eral min­utes before decid­ing to go in. I wish I could remem­ber her name, because the vaguest rec­ol­lec­tion of some of her work can make me laugh uncon­trol­lably. I hope she is OK. She was replaced by
    3. A woman who would prob­a­bly now be referred to as a ‘cougar’, who loved every­thing on the damned tele­vi­sion and took excru­ci­at­ing pains to let you know about it. She moved, I think, to one of the larger nearby cities, prob­a­bly Cary, or a sim­i­lar fea­ture­less sub­urb. And finally
    4. A guy that had been let go from another fam­ily paper under­go­ing media con­sol­i­da­tion. He was com­pe­tent, and obvi­ously loved his job, but his work lacked the enter­tain­ment value of #2. He was in poor health, and a lit­tle def­er­en­tial to the local power struc­ture, but entirely wor­thy of respect.
    Which brings me to my point. Why was Paul Har­vey syn­di­cated in this paper? Was it to con­vince peo­ple that the loss of one of the last remain­ing vibrant down­towns in the area was worth it just to have a Wal-Mart? Was it a slow pitch for the read­ers who could hear the same essay on the radio and mouth the words along with the text?
    I really have for­got­ten my point, except that the last time I saw this paper it was loaded with astro­turf for the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion. A kind of Volkische Beobachter for the Golden Cor­ral crowd. Thor­oughly depress­ing.
    Oh well. I’ve got to go attend the Mid-Atlantic regional con­fer­ence of attention-whores.

  13. colleen said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

    I am so sick of the anti-intellectual bent of so many in the US. (AKA: we don’t cot­ton much to fancy book learnin’) How can EITHER Obama be “elit­ist”? Michelle is from the south side of Chicago, for cryin’ out loud. They are where they are because they got some of that fancy book learnin’ and wanted to achieve in their lives. Why is that wrong? Isn’t that The Amer­i­can Dream?

    As for NPR being elitist…I don’t see it. I see why oth­ers do, but I don’t. (the Met Opera, yeah, but not the news oper­a­tion) It’s thought­ful. It takes time to explore sto­ries. It doesn’t yell at you and doesn’t tell you that other peo­ple who aren’t like you are stupid/immoral/unamerican.

    But again…why is it bad? I want to learn, I want to be smarter tomor­row than I am today, I want to dis­cover new things.

    Is think­ing bad?

  14. Jeff said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    “Volkische Beobachter for the Golden Cor­ral crowd”

    Phrases like this are why i have to read this site every day.

    (But can i steal that line? No, because a) steal­ing is one of them com­mand­ment thingys, b) pla­gia­rism would lose me my right to post here, and c) where else could i use it?)

  15. Kevin said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    As an XM sub­scriber, I can attest that Lee Abrams’ genius lies in radio pro­gram­ming, not in the news­pa­per business.

  16. nancy said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:15 pm

    Coo­zledad uses elit­ist humor! Volkische Beobachter, explained.

  17. Denise said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:17 pm

    OMG…I have a new book­mark (came over from Rome­nesko). I defend Abrams occa­sion­ally — I don’t work for a Trib paper — but your com­men­tary was spot on. Thanks for the smile and the brain tickle. :-)

  18. KeysCuda said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    My first thought when the Zell the Troll start­ing bring­ing this peo­ple in was: Radio peo­ple. CLEAR CHANNEL radio peo­ple, no less. Good lord. Because the com­mer­cial radio busi­ness is doing so damn well, I guess.
    (I work in news, not for a Tri­bune com­pany).
    No, we can’t be too intel­lec­tual, or elit­ist, less we lose fans like Abrams, who is so informed about the busi­ness he is charged with “inno­vat­ing” that he’s sur­prised to learn that war cor­re­spon­dents are actu­ally AT the war, and occa­sion­ally must dodge explo­sions. Good lord. He’s been lis­ten­ing to Fox for way too long.

    My favorite of his thoughts, which seem to fall to earth like bird drop­pings, came from an ear­lier mis­sive. He wants to see pho­tos of places where crimes were com­mit­ted, so you can say, “Oh, yeah. That cor­ner.” (not a quote).
    Now that’s a fine idea: Take up expen­sive newsprint and space in the rapidly shrink­ing new­s­hole to show: A street cor­ner where NOTHING is hap­pen­ing, but maybe did a few hours ago.
    Good lord. Save us all.

  19. Kirk said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:25 pm

    As a semi-elitist who once read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” I got the joke. And a good one it was.

  20. bill said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

    “Some of us are try­ing to under­stand the world’s events”

    And what Abrams is say­ing is do a bet­ter job of explain­ing them to the masses — much of which is not intellectual.

    Do this, and cir­cu­la­tion can improve. Fail to do this, and it can only con­tinue declining.

    Want to keep being a watchdog/fourth-estate/relevant jour­nal­ist? Then embrace Alter­na­tive Story For­mat (which Poyn­ter has proven is bet­ter retained and under­stood by read­ers), sharp design, witty/accurate head­lines and care­ful editing.

    This out­sider reflects the peo­ple news­pa­pers need to reach. Don’t be closed-minded. Stop argu­ing, men­tally tone down the rhetoric, start think­ing about the points he’s try­ing to make and find a way to imple­ment it.

    After all, what good is it to be smart and right if too few peo­ple are reading?!?

  21. nancy said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

    Some­one call­ing him or her­self “Lee Abrams” sent me this in an e-mail, and it’s too funny not to repro­duce here. (OBLIGATORY DISCLAIMER: I DON’T THINK THIS IS FROM THE REAL LEE ABRAMS.)

    Lee’s Blog
    June 18, 2008
    THINK PIECE: THE REVOL-YOU-TION IS GOING SRONG

    Just came back from Hart­ford and a visit with the Courant. I was expect­ing some progress, but I was BLOWN away by what they had cre­ated. No “tweaks” here: they’ve stripped all the vow­els out of sto­ries. Saves lots of space. Before I joined Tri­bune, I had NO IDEA that there were dif­fer­ent kinds of let­ters!! Bosnia and Ser­bia just have con­so­nants, and they are WAY over the top cool, with eth­nic clean­ing and stuff … This is some seri­ous re-invention in full motion that sym­bol­izes an alti­tude we need in all our nes­pa­pers, TV sta­tions, web sites and reel estate hold­ings. They know how to mar­ket a STAR, like Katie Courant – name the paper after ‘em. Hits the READER like a 2x4.

    * GREEN. Before I joined Tri­bune, I had NO idea that news­pa­pers were made out of TREES … And the paper never told me because it “assumed” I knew. Hell, papers should have pho­tos of lum­ber­jacks cut­ting down big oaks, stand­ing next to smil­ing squir­rels and owls …Put it above the sto­ries on the front: “This paper is brought to you by the White Oak — Illi­nois’ State Tree”. Peo­ple DON’T know that you have REAL trees exclu­sively being turned into pulp, because we ASSUME they do.

    * INTELIGENT, NOT ELITE. News­pa­pers strike me as being a lit­tle TOO NPR. I like NPR and lis­ten to “A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion” all the time and once did a cir­cle jerk with Gar­ri­son Keilor. But who wants to be like a radio net­work that lis­ten­ers enjoy so much that they just GIVE THEM MONEY every year??? Morn­ing News Radio has a lot of sim­i­lar­i­ties to papers: Sim­i­lar tar­get audi­ence: peo­ple pissed off, stuck in their cars wait­ing for the next trafic update to be broad­cast, talk­ing on their PHONES until the news is over. It’s prob­a­bly a good thing to study the feel of a well honed All News Radio sta­tion. Too bad there ain’t one .…. I like the New York Post too, but it also can be a bit elit­ist, call­ing the police com­mis­sioner the “com­mish” and all, and print­ing nice titty pic­tures. It’s all about being smart … not int­elec­tual. WE have that oportunity.

    * REMEDIAL READING ROCKS. We are rife with assump­tions.. That peo­ple will find great sto­ries … that peo­ple like read­ing … that peo­ple know how to read. Hell, before I joined Tri­bune, I read at a SECOND-grade level. “Curi­ous George” and “Green Eegs and Ham” were too hard. Don’t ASSUME your read­ers can read … or WANT TO. No one wants to lis­ten to All News Radio, but they have to if they want to know if it’s an over­turned bus or a car fire that’s got them stuck on the 405 for an hour. There are 25 mil­lion func­tion­ally illit­er­ate Amer­i­cans, and I’ll BET most of them don’t even read a news­pa­per! We can OWN that mar­ket if we set our mind to it.

    * LEANER STAFF. The Courant has fig­ured out how to keep putting out 300 pages per reporter while lay­ing most of them off. They have a win-win: BIGGER FONT. They use a 24 pt Albur­tus Extra Bold! Hits ‘em like a 2 x 4, espe­cially the old geezers whoz eyes are going…. They under­stand that a death spi­ral is bad only if we ASSUME it is. Rock n Roll knows that. No one would still be lis­ten­ing to the Doors if Jim Mor­ri­son hadn’t snorted too much coke and died in a French bath­tub. WE can be the Jimi Hen­drix of media, DROWNED in our own puke, and DELIVER it in 21st cen­tury terms right onto our read­ers’ shoes.

  22. LAMary said on June 18th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    My grandfather’s cousin was a jour­nal­ist turned politi­cian in Ger­many, and he was men­tioned in the Volkische Beobachter.

    http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​R​u​d​o​l​f​_​B​r​e​i​t​scheid

  23. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on June 18th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

    LAMary — of course he was! You are with­out peer, madame. And a cool link, too.

  24. Linda said on June 18th, 2008 at 8:22 pm

    Being anti-elitist appar­ently means believ­ing that most of the peo­ple on earth are morons. News­pa­pers are not the only insti­tu­tions to fall prey to this. I have spent most of my adult life work­ing in pub­lic libraries, and many are try­ing to be more “anti-elite” too – buy­ing more mid­dle­brow fic­tion, throw­ing out old clas­sics that don’t cir­cu­late as often, and aim­ing to pur­chase items that will bring in the biggest cir­cu­la­tion fig­ures so that we can give good levy sta­tis­tics. Some library sys­tems are con­sciously try­ing to aim their book pur­chases exclu­sively at the high school level or lower. In the day, we aimed for much pop­u­lar stuff, but also infor­ma­tion that allowed peo­ple to edu­cate them­selves, if they so desired. So, not only are infor­ma­tion sources dumb­ing down, but infor­ma­tion and cul­tural archivists, too.

  25. coozledad said on June 18th, 2008 at 8:31 pm

    Jeff: Feel free to use it. Just keep in mind that I’m not cer­tain I didn’t uncon­sciously lift it myself. Some­times I get it through my fill­ings.
    I think it was Fran­cis Corn­ford who said some­thing along the lines of “We are none of us stand­ing apart from the cir­cum­am­bi­ent atmos­phere of our time.” after he’d nearly drowned him­self in a case of sherry.

  26. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on June 18th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

    Re: Herr Bre­itscheid — accord­ing to the wiki entry, “the day he died it was a birth­day, and i noticed it was mine, and my head didn’t know just who i was, and i went spin­ning back in time …”

    A round for who­ever can name that tune with­out googling, and we’ll drink to Rudolph.

  27. beb said on June 18th, 2008 at 11:16 pm

    Elit­ism is the new word replacing“liberal” as the conservative’s swear word. Evil peo­ple are elites. Democ­rats are evil there­fore they are elites. Blacks who aren’t liv­ing in the ghetto are elites. Any­one rail­ing about “elites” is prob­a­bly push­ing a con­ser­v­a­tive agenda.

    As Jon Stew­art says about elitesin the White House, “I WANT some­one smarter than me in the White House.”

  28. Joe K said on June 19th, 2008 at 12:43 am

    Want to make a radio sta­tion owner sweat?
    Just men­tion x.m. or pan­dora inter­net radio.
    They turn pale.
    Lov­ing my X.M. channel12.
    Joe K

  29. Hattie said on June 19th, 2008 at 1:58 am

    Yes, but mel­ons ARE a lux­ury item in Japan,so what’s your complaint?

  30. whitebeard said on June 19th, 2008 at 4:35 am

    Nancy,I thought that the “Lee Adams” par­ody was price­less because of my con­nec­tion to Hart­ford, but then I thought the orig­i­nal Lee Adams memo posted by Rome­nesko on Poyn­ter was also a par­ody “Before I joined Tri­bune, I had NO idea that reporters were around the globe report­ing the news.“
    That kind of mind­set would believe that hens laid three dif­fer­ent kinds of eggs, boiled, scram­bled and fried but you never knew which until you cracked the shell open.
    When I worked in Mon­treal, I never knew my news­pa­per had a Paris bureau until the office was closed (prob­a­bly a major rea­son for clos­ing the office).
    When I worked in The Soo, we had an edi­tor who laid out advance pages and he laid out one page with a story about the upcom­ing launch of the Cana­dian satel­lite Alou­ette 1 (French for lark or sky­lark), another story on one page about the actual launch (Sept. 29, 1962) and then a third story about some minor glitch. Unfor­tu­nately, all three advance pages ran the same day. Abrams prob­a­bly would have praised that as suc­cess­ful packaging.

  31. Terry WAlter said on June 19th, 2008 at 4:56 am

    Cud any1 splain sumthin too a num­nah like me? Howzit that are prezi­dent gets called Dum­bya? Hain’t he a gra­di­ate of that poi­son ivy school Yale? I thot yah hadta be damn near geenyus to get inta them kinda places. Hell, B-Rock was purt­n­ear 40 fore he got done payin fer his Har­vard larnin. Seems ta me ifn ya make it thru one of them places, NOBODY should be a callin ya stoopid. BTW, cud yall tell me how ta get rid a those dam red lines unner my words?

  32. Big Tuna said on June 19th, 2008 at 8:06 am

    Of course you love NPR.…it’s sub­sidised by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment! It doesn’t have to make money. It’s whole busi­ness model is based on social­ism so

    As soon as news­pa­pers are “not for profit”, or sub­sidised, then you can have them feel like NPR all you want to.

    Until then, since news­pa­pers are a BUSINESS, not a HOBBY. news­pa­pers do need to feel more like news-talk radio.…and by that I mean PROFITABLE

  33. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on June 19th, 2008 at 8:35 am

    Tuna — if you think this is a happy hive of social­ist drones, you need to click back through the archive a bit.

    NPR rep­re­sents one kind of busi­ness model, one which can’t be repli­cated too gen­er­ally. But between a mod­est amount of pub­lic sup­port for CPB and a pure, Bat­Boy, Brit­ney­Paris­Jes­sica, sales at the reg­is­ter tabs, is a vast expanse of possibilities.

    Some prophets raise their staff and say “fol­low me this way to the Promised Land,” and they point towards dis­tant peaks marked by bill­boards the whole way, while a fel­low who looks like Tom Brokaw is ask­ing “what hap­pened to my flock” and another guy, six feet plus is just jump­ing up and down shout­ing, “Mr. Pres­i­dent, shut the frak up!”

    Weekly World News turns out not to be the sales and money-making bonanza it once was, and all the con­gre­ga­tion says — Amen! — and it was tech­ni­cally as able to be mar­ket respon­sive as any­one. So bid­ness ver­sus pointy-haided libruls isn’t exactly what hap­pened there.

    It’s just that along with fig­ur­ing out what it means to work in this wacky field of pro­vid­ing writ­ten con­tent to read­ers while still get­ting paid some­thing for our work, when peo­ple are still will­ing to pay for some­thing (but how? and where? using pay­pal?), we’re will­ing to be skep­ti­cal about the con­sul­tants and new man­age­r­ial staff who come down from on high expect­ing to be treated like Moses when they say “Con­tent is king!” (Ner­vous yet eager and still impe­ri­ous glances back and forth across first news­room meet­ing, stac­cato laugh after silence reigns).

    Then they say “look, 4th grade read­ing level isn’t so bad, lots of good writ­ing done with shorter words. Oh, and reader gen­er­ated con­tent — how great is that! Writ­ing you don’t have to pay for! (Cackle chokes off when he real­izes the peo­ple he’s speak­ing to get paid to write, and may not find that so amus­ing, and do not.)

    News­pa­pers in par­tic­u­lar (but radio, too) have been raped by profit-taking maraud­ers who rode 40% mar­gins down to 15% and head­ing to 5% and never re-invested in the prod­uct, the phys­i­cal plant, or the staffing other than to build a new print­ing plant they could rent out dur­ing the day to mass mail­ers and a new vend­ing machine for the break room after the old one seized up. And they blame every­thing from the vend-o-mat break­ing to the loss of read­ers on the employees.

    I don’t think the peo­ple run­ning news­pa­pers know what they’re talk­ing about, because they haven’t for thirty years and they’re still say­ing the same crud. Yes, the busi­ness changed, and we’ve been chang­ing and adapt­ing on the writ­ing side (find a 1967 paper front page, fea­ture front, and op-ed, and pull this week’s ana­logue, and com­pare). The man­agers have changed noth­ing but their under­wear, and i’m not con­fi­dent of that.

    So take your social­ist crack, Big Tuna, and stuff it in your glove com­part­ment (by the way, no one wears gloves to drive any­more, but i guess social­ism makes us still call it that), and ask why NPR is build­ing lis­ten­er­ship while ClearChan­nel is pan­cak­ing in the face of satel­lite radio.

  34. Colleen said on June 19th, 2008 at 8:45 am

    As a pub­lic radio employee (local sta­tion, NOT the net­work), I need to address the “sub­zidized by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment” remark.

    Yes. We DO get money from the feds. In the case of our station’s bud­get, it’s some­where in the area of 15 – 20% of a 1.2 mil­lion dol­lar bud­get. The rest comes from lis­ten­ers, under­writ­ers and grants.

    As for how much comes from each taxpayer…I’ve heard num­bers rang­ing from a quar­ter to 50 cents per taxpayer.

    So I’m always tempted to try to end the “gov­ern­ment sub­si­dized” argu­ment with “if I give you a dol­lar, will you con­sider that a refund and go away?”

  35. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on June 19th, 2008 at 9:31 am

    For many out­lets, it’s more like 12%. At this point, they could go pri­vate if they needed to, but the real point is that the wis­dom of the mar­ket is not all see­ing and all know­ing. I’m happy to sup­port CPB and their NPR & PBS sta­tions, but the ques­tion is whether it really is the mar­ket telling news­pa­pers and tv sta­tions to go all agi­ta­tion all the time, or profit-maximizers — and as a good solid free mar­ket Repub­li­can, profit-whoring along isn’t the ideal expres­sion of the mar­ket­place. Solid­ity and con­ti­nu­ity and sus­tain­abil­ity are con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, too, and suck­ing the value out of a busi­ness and walk­ing away at the first mar­ket shock or cul­tural shift say­ing “the mar­ket did it” is a lie. The voice of the free mar­ket is not profit alone, not max­i­mum profit, and not the fig leaf of “breach of fidu­ciary respon­si­bil­ity,” which is the most per­ni­cious myth (if i were Olber­mann i’d say “lie” again) that the busi­ness com­mu­nity has sold this side of arms indus­try expan­sion being good for the economy.

    Short term gain is just that — short term think­ing. Con­ser­v­a­tives are sup­posed to be about the long haul, look­ing back and down the road.

  36. coozledad said on June 19th, 2008 at 9:38 am

    Colleen: What you fail to rec­og­nize is the type of world Big Tuna is argu­ing for. It’s a Hobbe­sian par­adise of old surfers beg­ging on the street for toll fare, defended (or not) by pri­vately funded armies, rousted from sleep­ing on grates by pri­vately con­tracted police forces, and their frozen bod­ies carted off at dawn by pri­vately held waste col­lec­tion cor­po­ra­tions to rot or be reclaimed as Big­Tuna burg­ers. What Big­Tuna fails to rec­og­nize, is that these cor­po­ra­tions will ulti­mately demand tax­payer sub­si­dies (as Hal­libur­ton and Black­wa­ter are at this very moment) but they will be col­lected at bay­o­net point, and with­out rep­re­sen­ta­tion.
    Essen­tially the ideal soci­ety they are try­ing to pro­mote is Shang­hai circa 1936.

  37. Randy said on June 19th, 2008 at 9:55 am

    We have one of those plain-speakin’ guys on our all-news sta­tion. He deliv­ers a daily com­men­tary, and last week he mused on the apol­ogy given to Abo­rig­i­nal peo­ples by the Cana­dian gov­ern­ment. Specif­i­cally, an apol­ogy for putting sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of chil­dren into church-run res­i­den­tial schools, which spawned a seem­ingly eter­nal legacy of dysfunction.

    No sur­prise, he con­sid­ered the apol­ogy unnec­es­sary. In fact, the schools saved a lot of peo­ple from far worse fates. Sure, there was abuse, and count­less fam­i­lies were ripped apart, and there was an active effort to elim­i­nate abo­rig­i­nal cul­ture, but they did learn their three Rs, so it evens out in the end…

    Oh my, it was igno­rant. And he does it every day. And he’s the news director.

  38. Big Tuna said on June 19th, 2008 at 11:44 am

    All I did was accu­rately use the term social­ist busi­ness model and every­one flew off the handle.…bringing in tan­gents like Hal­libur­ton, Weekly World News, and Abo­rig­i­nal commentary.

    Bot­tom line…the NPR vs. News­pa­per anal­ogy is poor because their busi­ness expec­ta­tions are dif­fer­ent. The cur­rent news­pa­per model is DEAD! Zell, Michaels and Abrams seem to be the only print oper­a­tors try­ing to inno­vate and I give them credit for trying.

    Right or wrong, under the cur­rent for-profit model, news­pa­pers need to make a prod­uct that gen­er­ates more money than it costs to pro­duce. NPR is not doing that. PBS is not doing that. To encour­age news­pa­pers to be more like them will not log­i­cally lead to a more sound finan­cial base.

  39. brian stouder said on June 19th, 2008 at 11:55 am

    Oddly enough, this con­ver­sa­tion now some­what echoes the pub­lic financing/private financ­ing shamoz­zle cur­rently unfold­ing between McCain and Obama -

    wherein the Repub­li­can can­di­date is claim­ing greater moral purity, thanks to his com­mit­ment to plac­ing his cam­paign onto the pub­lic dole; as opposed to the Demo­c­ra­tic can­di­date who is eschew­ing pub­lic financ­ing, in favor of col­lect­ing money from peo­ple like me. (And oth­er­wise, he would be com­pelled to turn away our contributions!)

    I’ll give McCain this much credit — he has ALWAYS had this wrong­headed idea about social­ized cam­paign financ­ing, and heavy restric­tions on free speech and asso­ci­a­tion in the polit­i­cal process

  40. nancy said on June 19th, 2008 at 11:57 am

    Abrams wasn’t analo­giz­ing news­pa­pers and NPR as a busi­ness. He was say­ing news­pa­pers need to be dumber (unlike elit­ist NPR). I worked for 26 years in news­pa­pers, 1979 to 2005, and we went through a great dumb­i­fi­ca­tion. We were told over and over and over to cut, tighten and assume our read­ers didn’t care about any­thing that didn’t apply directly to their lives. The “100-year-old cob­bler” story — code for an inter­est­ing fea­ture — was scorned as “lack­ing util­ity” for the busy, time-starved reader.

    My hus­band, a fea­ture edi­tor, once labored might­ily with a young reporter to craft and pol­ish a lovely lit­tle story about these aging Fil­ipino war brides in Fort Wayne, who came to the U.S. as young women, and one by one found each other and formed a social group. Once a week they’d get together for mah jongg and home cookin’. The story was about how the group sticks together, now that the mem­bers are aging and dying. It was really a won­der­ful por­trait of a part of the com­mu­nity most peo­ple had no idea existed. You know what the edi­tor in chief said? It needed a use­ful take­away. He sug­gested a side­bar on how to play mah jongg.

    I’ve beaten this drum so often I’ve worn out the skin, but I’ll say it once more: What’s killing papers isn’t that they’re too smart, “elit­ist” or oth­er­wise brainy. Their busi­ness model has been upended by tech­nol­ogy and instead of think­ing wisely about how to recover or adapt to the new world, they employ peo­ple like Abrams, who sug­gest we run pic­tures of reporters with Iraqi kids. I appre­ci­ate that he’s mak­ing the effort, but excuse me for think­ing it’s not the answer.

  41. Big Tuna said on June 19th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    My con­tention was never with Abrams, but the author of this article.

    NPR does not have a prof­itable prod­uct, why should news­pa­pers expect to become more prof­itable by being more like NPR.

  42. nancy said on June 19th, 2008 at 12:21 pm

    NPR may not be prof­itable, but its b-model is not-for-profit. I’ve yet to visit an NPR sta­tion that wasn’t pretty well-equipped, because they’re not giv­ing all the prof­its to the owner’s wife’s plas­tic sur­geon. They also have a pretty good record of slav­ish lis­tener loy­alty. And my point isn’t that news­pa­pers need to be more like NPR (although that would be fine — per­haps we could start with the assump­tion that our read­ers aren’t clue­less morons who need us to tell them how to raise chil­dren), but that they don’t need to be more like all-news radio. We have dumbed our­selves down con­sid­er­ably already, and all that’s hap­pened is a steadily increas­ing cir­cu­la­tion slide.

  43. ZamSell said on June 19th, 2008 at 12:32 pm

    Sam Zell is a pathetic, small-minded fool who got lucky find­ing loop­holes in the real estate busi­ness to make a lot of money. He bent a lot of rules. He bilked a lot of lit­tle peo­ple. His shady busi­ness deal­ings may have worked in the real estate arena, but as soon as he tried to make money in a busi­ness that is highly trans­par­ent and scru­ti­nized, his flaws as a busi­ness­man and as a human being became clear. He is a bully — a small-minded shop­keeper who swin­dled so much cash he began to believe his own lies about being a busi­ness genius. He sur­rounded him­self with a bunch of ador­ing, well-paid acolytes who con­sis­tently affirmed to him his genius in exchange for fat salaries. Peo­ple like Abrams aren’t smart or have any par­tic­u­lar busi­ness savvy. (Come on. Who WASN’T mak­ing money in radio and real estate dur­ing the late 1990s and early 2000s?) They just know how to pucker up to the boss and flat­ter his crude sen­si­bil­i­ties and assauge his insecurities.

  44. Big Tuna said on June 19th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    My whole argu­ment was based on the busi­ness, not whether talk radio is a bet­ter prod­uct than news­pa­paer or NPR.

    Satel­lite radio is a great prod­uct, I love it. But it’s a prod­uct that has never turned a profit, lost BILLIONS of dol­lars and will likely go bank­rupt if they don’t get approval of their merger. The resources it takes to make this great prod­uct will always exceed the rev­enue it produces.

    NPR is a great prod­uct. But if it did not get fed­eral fund­ing and it was required to turn a profit, it would be bankrupt.

    News­pa­pers could be a very smart, won­der­ful prod­uct. But the resources it would take to make that prod­uct would be far more than the rev­enue generated.

    Iron­i­cally, it turns out that all of these years most news­pa­pers were also subsidised.…..by clas­si­fied ads. Once those dol­lars went away, the report­ing and jour­nal­ism couldn’t stand on it’s own from a busi­ness standpoint.

  45. Donnieb78 said on June 19th, 2008 at 4:33 pm

    Jeff (the mild-mannered one), although I haven’t heard that song in 25 years, easy, that would be Cathe­dral by Gra­ham Nash/CSN, no?

  46. ydnews said on June 19th, 2008 at 4:48 pm

    I’ll never for­get the time I saw Sam Zell at a San Fran­cisco insti­tu­tional real estate con­fab and dis­cov­ered he had like one tooth on his top gum­line. I always won­dered why — not like he didn’t have the money to get his teeth fixed. But if you ‘ve seen him in action, you know Zell likes to be out­ra­geous, and there’s no bet­ter way to out­rage elit­ists than to be a multi-billionaire flash­ing a one-toothed grin! Now THAT’s elitist!

  47. joodyb said on June 19th, 2008 at 8:49 pm

    ‘sub­si­dized’ by clas­si­fieds? wow.

  48. Maria Padhila said on June 19th, 2008 at 10:39 pm

    CAN I HAZ CAPSLOKK? (Thanks to you and your com­menters for the good reads…)

  49. » Miscellaneous musings for a TGIF Friday MiniMediaGuy: studying the media ecosystem said on June 20th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    […] But he also deliv­ered them in a rather breath­less and some golly gee whiz man­ner which is lam­pooned by for­mer news­pa­per colum­nist turned blog­ger Nancy Nall Der­ringer. * * * Despite the debt bur­den on […]

  50. jr said on June 30th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    I have been read­ing those Abrams memos assum­ing they were jokes… but I real­ize now, to my hor­ror, that it’s all true. I’m shocked. Could some­one actu­ally rise to a posi­tion of power with­out know­ing that Broad­way shows took place in New York, and that reporters writ­ing about war actu­ally went to wars to wit­ness it first-hand? I’m horrified.

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